Spam is a real irritant for those who transact Online. Even worse is the increasing assualts on an individual user’s Online privacy. Infractions can quickly go from mildly annoying to outright financially ruining if some miscreant gets hold of your credit card details & misuses it. So how does one protect Online privacy?

While there have been tools & services in the past that offer temporary email IDs or telephone numbers, here’s a 1st attempt by an Online company in giving you a comprehensive mechanism that it claims will prevent “nosy Parkers” from ferreting away your personal information.

Called MaskMe, this is a service you can add to your Web browser that prevents websites, hackers or even spammers from getting too much of your personal information, like email addresses, phone numbers & credit cards. The idea is simple – use it to protect your Online privacy by giving out “Masked” information.

MaskMe lets you create new logins, credit cards & even fake phone numbers that act as proxies for the real ones. So if these get compromised, users can just delete them & create fresh ones.

The new security service has been launched by one of the better-known brands in Online security, the Boston, USA-based Abine, Inc. Three friends got together & built an early suite of privacy products that today make up Abine’s core tools: DNTMe, DeleteMe, & now MaskMe.

To protect your Online privacy, all you need is to download & install MaskMe as a Web browser extension, available for now with Chrome & Firefox. As & when a user tries signing up for a new service, MaskMe automatically detects it, & offers to create a new email & password for it. All the user has to then do is remember a single master passphrase. In the meantime, all his emails will be forwarded to his real email address. If he/she starts getting spammed or suffer a security breach, a simple click will ensure that the temp email address vanishes forever. Emails & masked passwords fall under the “free” portion of this service.

To protect your Online privacy, MaskMe offers more. You can use this service to also “mask” your phone number & credit cards. But for this you will need to subscribe to the Premium version of MaskMe, for US $5 per month. Once you do that, MaskMe will also make proxies for these so everytime you have to use your credit card Online, it will conjure up a new, temporary one that will be charged instead, then passing on the cost to your actual card.

Here are the thing you can do using MaskMe:

• Eliminate spam from your inbox
• Get access to the websites you want, without being forced to give up your real email address
• Keep your info out of the hands of companies that sell, share, or lose it
• Secure your credit card from getting hacked
• Make life easier by keeping your accounts organized in one safe place
• Create secure, unique passwords for every site
• Safe online shopping.
• No more surprise credit card charges
• Stay one step ahead of hackers and fraudsters
• Log in & sign up for websites super quickly
• Reduce tracking and profiling about when you sign up with websites or purchase things online

Just in case you are wondering, MaskMe claims to keep your data safe with AES-256 encryption, the world’s leading standard in data protection. Not even the Abine team can access your data, says the company.

Image Credit: MaskMe

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